Today's post will be about dreams...
Dreams...What to say about them? Scientifically, dreams are caused by the brain re-wiring itself each night. People get wealthy interpreting others' dreams. But what are dreams? The fluff-and-stuff of the brain shuffling through and re-filing newly added information? The heart's deepest desires, set into motion by a tired mind, the one connection between thoughts and emotions? Dreams. Holding a dream only happens in movies thanks to computer graphics. What would happen if reality collided with the dream world? Would every wish become truth? Dreams. One song calls dreams 'inconsistent angel things'. Does this make us closer to the heavenly beings when we dream? Are dreams merely reflections of heaven distorted by mirrors and lenses of the heart and eyes? Dreams. The cobwebs of the mind? Maybe. Dreams. No scientist can study them. Dreams. What are they? Dreams. period. Just dreams. Ever-changing, yet that word is the only one to describe them. Dreams..
According to Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden (I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the evolution of the human mind) "One view, published in a reputable scientific paper, holds that the function of dreams is to wake us up a little, every now and then, to see if anyone is about to eat us". Fortunately, now a days, we don't really have to worry about being eaten unless camping in grizzly bear breeding grounds is high on your list of "things to do before you die". In which case, I recommend saving that adventure for the time when you really do want to die. But I digress...
However, Sagan quickly disproves the above theory replacing it with yet another. "Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconcious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory". Yet, one of his more interesting findings is that as the night approaches its end we have more vivid, emotional dreams. These dreams bring on our childhood and early life. But we know that those need not be filed away in long-term memory because they already are.
So what causes these dreams?
At the end of Sagan's discussion of dreams, he has a very interesting revelation, a sort of...food for thought.
"We are descended from reptiles and mammals both. In the daytime repression of the R-complex (the midbrain, containing the olfactostriatum, the corpus striatum, and the globus pallidus) and in the nighttime stirring of the dream dragons, we may each of us be replaying the hundred-million-year-old warfare between the reptiles and the mammals...
Perhaps the dream state permits, in our fantasy and its reality, the R-complex to function regularly, as if it were still in control."
A long winded post to come to no conclusions. I apologize...
Dreams...What to say about them? Scientifically, dreams are caused by the brain re-wiring itself each night. People get wealthy interpreting others' dreams. But what are dreams? The fluff-and-stuff of the brain shuffling through and re-filing newly added information? The heart's deepest desires, set into motion by a tired mind, the one connection between thoughts and emotions? Dreams. Holding a dream only happens in movies thanks to computer graphics. What would happen if reality collided with the dream world? Would every wish become truth? Dreams. One song calls dreams 'inconsistent angel things'. Does this make us closer to the heavenly beings when we dream? Are dreams merely reflections of heaven distorted by mirrors and lenses of the heart and eyes? Dreams. The cobwebs of the mind? Maybe. Dreams. No scientist can study them. Dreams. What are they? Dreams. period. Just dreams. Ever-changing, yet that word is the only one to describe them. Dreams..
According to Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden (I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the evolution of the human mind) "One view, published in a reputable scientific paper, holds that the function of dreams is to wake us up a little, every now and then, to see if anyone is about to eat us". Fortunately, now a days, we don't really have to worry about being eaten unless camping in grizzly bear breeding grounds is high on your list of "things to do before you die". In which case, I recommend saving that adventure for the time when you really do want to die. But I digress...
However, Sagan quickly disproves the above theory replacing it with yet another. "Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconcious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory". Yet, one of his more interesting findings is that as the night approaches its end we have more vivid, emotional dreams. These dreams bring on our childhood and early life. But we know that those need not be filed away in long-term memory because they already are.
So what causes these dreams?
At the end of Sagan's discussion of dreams, he has a very interesting revelation, a sort of...food for thought.
"We are descended from reptiles and mammals both. In the daytime repression of the R-complex (the midbrain, containing the olfactostriatum, the corpus striatum, and the globus pallidus) and in the nighttime stirring of the dream dragons, we may each of us be replaying the hundred-million-year-old warfare between the reptiles and the mammals...
Perhaps the dream state permits, in our fantasy and its reality, the R-complex to function regularly, as if it were still in control."
A long winded post to come to no conclusions. I apologize...
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